The Intergalactic Mashup King

Herzog certainly has himself convinced – which is part of what makes the movie work. Throughout our conversation, he corrects me if I dare break the spell by mentioning Antarctica: “No, no, it’s not the Antarctic,”
he says firmly. “It’s Andromeda.”

POSTS

While many of Herzog’s genre-bending movies get classified as
documentaries, he isn’t known for a Smithsonian-style reverence for the historical record. In fact, the director has always had an ambivalent relationship with facts. During our interview, he seems disappointed when I produce a tape recorder. “The reporters who don’t use tape are always the ones who get the story right in the end,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. His 1971 film Land of Silence and Darkness, about
a com­munity of blind and deaf people, includes fabricated “interviews,” while Lessons of Darkness opens with a title card quoting Pascal – but the epigraph is simply made up. “You shouldn’t
mix up fact and truth,” Herzog says. “I do not trust facts so much as I trust human ecstasies.”

Still, courtesy of NASA scientists, there are plenty of facts in The Wild Blue Yonder. Roger Diehl and Ted Sweetser, both engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab, plot interplanetary course trajectories on a whiteboard; Martin Lo, a JPL mission designer, explains something called “low-energy chaotic transport.” Herzog knows it sounds
like malarkey, but this time the science
is on his side. “The kind of mathematics
he’s talking about sounds like sheer fantasy,” Herzog says. “But the ideas behind it are completely legitimate.”

So how did Herzog get a bunch of NASA geeks to take part in a film that dismisses the idea of space travel? “It was kind of embarrassing for me,” he says. “Here are these astronauts who’ve done these wonderful things. What do I say now?”

Herzog decided to be honest about
his skepticism when he went to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to ask for help. Luckily, he found that inside the hyperrational heart of a space cowboy lives the soul of an artist. “He was very direct in telling me what he thought,” says Lo, who recalls their conversations fondly and thinks the finished film is “really beautiful.” But when pressed for what, if any, common ground he has with Herzog, Lo pauses.

“I’m not sure you always have to agree with someone to create a piece of fantasy,” he answers. “If I were very political about this, I would have refused to work with him. But I see this as an artistic process. There’s nothing wrong with his way of doing things.”

The respect is mutual. “There’s
an inherent beauty and elegance in what those at the forefront are doing, discovering these new mathematical paradigms,” Herzog says. “Nobody
has ever seen this continent – they
are the first ones. I envy them.” So envious – and grateful – is Herzog that in the film’s end credits, the very first title card thanks “NASA, for its sense
of poetry.”